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The Kills: I don't feel the need to explain our relationship

On stage their sexual chemistry is mind-blowing, off stage they bought a house then he married a supermodel and she was the ‘best man’; Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart are the most beguiling duo in rock. Hermione Eyre meets The Kills

Early morning and The Kills are draped across their chairs like recently dis-interred corpses, cringing at the daylight. Getting up this early is not cool. Nor is the beaming sun, apparently. ‘I hate sunshine so much,’ says Alison Mosshart. ‘I can only cope with it when it’s bitterly, bitterly cold.’ Jamie Hince laughs at her. ‘You sound like Lux Interior from The Cramps. He used to carry around a parasol because he said that a suntan was incompatible with rock’n’roll.’ ‘The sun,’ says Alison sententiously, dragging on a cigarette, ‘gives you cancer.’

Like all the best rock bands, The Kills have a touch of Spinal Tap about them. They have been a duo for more than a decade, producing four albums — including one called No Wow, bemoaning the lack of ‘wow’ in contemporary culture — the latest of which is Blood Pressures. She’s 33, comes from Florida, and gives off shy, angry vibes, frequently messing up her hair so it hides her face. She’s kinda intense. She flinches when four plates of fruit are put down on a table next to her. ‘This fruit is, like, closing me in.’

Jamie, 43, is British, with a lived-in face and a South London accent. He plays guitar with a fag on, while she sings their repetitive, cryptic lyrics (‘Easy alphabet pony’) in husky Siouxsie Sioux tones. They chose the name The Kills because it ‘could be from any decade’. They love touring, and have huge stamina for it, sitting on pavements drinking gin, getting tattoos, playing pool, rocking out small-capacity dives and constantly pulling poses (now published as a book by photographer Kenneth Cappello called Dream & Drive). They have a committed cult following, though album sales peaked at 40 in the charts; Samantha Morton directed their last video, and Jack White recruited Alison to join his part-time band The Dead Weather. The Kills are quite possibly rock’n’roll’s best-kept secret.

Except someone’s gone and blown their cover — Kate Moss, Jamie’s partner of three years and, as of last July, his wife. I can see a little tattoo that says ‘Kate über alles’ on his inner left arm, complete with an umlaut (because he’s a graduate of Goldsmiths; he’ll talk forever, with real passion, about Francis Picabia and Max Ernst, if you’ll let him). He and Kate recently adopted a Staffordshire terrier-cross, Archie, together and Jamie is dotty about him. He’s even given him a voice. ‘Archie’s started talking to me in my dreams. I dreamed I was killing a dog, a really little dog...’ ‘Everyone’s mad at him for having this dream,’ interjects Alison. ‘Even my mum.’ ‘...and Archie came into the dream and said [adopts a small, squeaky voice], “Oh, don’t do that, ’e’s only little.” ’

We’re sitting in a café on the Essex Road called Meat People, which strikes me as ironic given The Kills are vegans. ‘Not any more, we’re not,’ says Alison. ‘I was vegan for about 20 years,’ says Jamie slowly. ‘But then… the thing that really tipped me over the edge was when I first met Kate, had just started seeing her, and I walked into the kitchen and she was in her underwear making me a bacon sandwich. She didn't know I was vegan, and I was like… all my principles went out of the window.’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘Or my priorities went right.’

You can’t help but be pleased for him. He seems like a sweetie. He’s unusual, certainly (Kate was always going to marry someone happy to wear a silk dressing-gown cord as a tie, as Hince appears to be doing today), but he’s a man, not a boyish Pete Doherty-style disaster. The consensus from friends is that he is loving and supportive and makes Kate truly happy. I like the idea that this hopeless dreamer, this rock’n’roll believer, has ended up living in a £7.5 million house in Highgate, married in suitable style (a three-day wedding in the Cotswolds with only 138 guests but an estimated £500,000 budget). Alison was ‘best man’ and made a profanity-heavy, heartfelt speech, and ended the evening locking lips with Kelly Osbourne.

Before meeting Moss, The Kills roughed it for a long time. ‘I squatted for most of my adult life,’ says Jamie. He was in an art school rock band called Scarfo, producing tracks with titles such as ‘Chomsky Airport’. ‘I’m not condoning squatting, it was just the only way I could do what I wanted to do. I didn’t have, you know, a trust fund or parents that could help out.’ ‘I lived in the shittiest places in the entire world,’ pipes up Alison. ‘And ate toast and carrots.’

‘It’s pretty brutal,’ says Jamie. ‘There’s not many people that would pass that initiation. You have to have something in your blood, something in your genes that means you only see the fantasy and the romance and the beauty in some pretty grim things. We’ll play gigs in absolute dumps, but to me they’re like… cathedrals.’ ‘Churches,’ says Alison. ‘All those fans and musicians passing through have left their mark.’ Their favourite London venue is the Roundhouse.

Hince’s father was a construction site manager, and the family went from Swaziland to South Africa to the Shetland Isles, where Hince’s only friend was a broken Hammond organ, which he pretended to play. Mosshart spent her teens in a state of alienation among skater dudes; from the age of 14 she fronted an indie band, called Discount, going wild on the mic, exorcising demons, becoming a star.

‘London’s become a lot less bohemian in the past ten years,’ says Jamie. ‘It feels like being in a band is a luxury now, like you can only do it if you’re signed really early or you come from a wealthy family. There used to be streets of squats and social housing. Now they’ve sold ’em all off and changed the squatting laws. Blair screwed up royally. I never believed in him, I thought they seemed as scuzzy as the last lot. But some people did. Billy Bragg must be feeling pretty ashamed.’

Mosshart was staying in a housing cooperative in London in 1999 when she heard Hince playing in the flat upstairs. ‘It was my dream guitar, really weird-sounding, broken and strange.’ They found they were reading the same book — an Edie Sedgwick biography — and bonded over a love of out-of-date technology. ‘We’d sit for hours, talking and fixing old tape recorders,’ says Jamie. ‘Then we’d start recording on them and that’s how the band came about.’ When a neighbour died, a skipful of recording equipment came their way. ‘It was amazing,’ says Mosshart. ‘Jamie came home to find me sitting in this mound of junk.’

Moving from Florida to London was a leap of faith into a world of art rock, typewriters, beat poems, skinny jeans and stylish poses. ‘People were performing dressed like roadies, in Carhartt T-shirts and cargo pants, like Ed Sheeran,’ says Jamie. ‘Then a few bands, The Strokes and The White Stripes, kicked the door down. We were like, “At last.” It felt like we were stealing back what was ours.’

Hince and Mosshart bought a house together in Dalston in 2004. Now Hince has moved on, she lives in Islington and is currently single. They were never lovers, but sometimes strange things happened on stage. In one photograph from a live gig, Alison writhes on her back, while Jamie rams his guitar between her thighs. ‘Anyway,’ says Jamie, embarrassed, ‘that didn’t feel like it looks.’ Alison peers at the photo. ‘The thing I like is the carpet, it’s so disgusting and dirty, it’s really cool.’ She maintains that, during a live performance, anything can happen. ‘If a show’s good, it’s like you elevate to some other place that’s like a dream. Afterwards, I have the feeling it was the best show, but I can’t quite remember what happened.’

Their lyrics are abstruse, and getting more so. I ask Alison what ‘Easy alphabet pony’ means, and she says blankly, ‘Whatever you want it to mean. You stifle a song by explaining it.’ Is Hince’s writing inspired by his missus? ‘What, Kate? Obviously. Important things inspire songs. But it’s also a curse, because the best lyrics are when you really lay yourself on the line and make yourself vulnerable, and I find it really hard to do that now. Privacy has become the most precious thing. Things have got more cryptic in my writing.’

Jamie believes music overcomes the petty affairs of life and love: ‘The music carries us through and will do long after we don’t talk.’ Alison’s face falls. ‘That’s never gonna happen,’ he adds hurriedly. ‘I mean it’s bigger than us.’ ‘I don’t feel the need to explain our relationship,’ says Alison. ‘Our relationship is super-cool, it’s my favourite thing in the world.’ She has a tattoo on the heel of her hand marking the date of the first gig they played together. Jamie puts it in words: ‘I’m gonna keep doing The Kills in whatever form for the rest of my life.’ ES

The Kills’ new book Dream & Drive is out on 16 August (Domino, £30)

On the town

Favourite pub

Jamie: The Flask in Highgate. The Moon Under Water is George Orwell’s short story about the perfect pub, which he says doesn’t exist, but this is it.